Established in 1962, the MIT Press is one of the largest and most distinguished university presses in the world and a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design.

Breadcrumb

Nadim Samman

Rare Earth is an attempt to define the spirit of an age. Exploring how today's myths, identities, and cosmologies relate to current advances in technology—through reference to the material basis to our most developed weapons and tools; a class of seventeen rare earth elements from the periodic table—Rare Earth challenges the rhetoric of immateriality associated with our hypermodern condition.

Rare earth elements are the game-changing foundation of our most powerful innovations, are fundamental to contemporary accoutrements such as mobile phones, iPods and iPads, liquid crystal displays, LEDs, light bulbs, CDs and DVDs. Often described as conflict materials due to the limited number of easily accessible mines, they are also integral to weapon systems used for cyber-warfare, medical technologies (including MRI scanning equipment), hybrid vehicles, wind turbines, and other green energy applications. Consequently, rare earth elements play an increasing role in global affairs and power inventions that facilitate our changing self-image—giving birth to today's emergent myths and identities.

Rare Earth grounds our strange, seemingly weightless cultural moment. While we may design our technologies, these tools and weapons shape us in turn. It may seem that we dream the contemporary into existence, but perhaps rare earth elements are dreaming through us. After the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, this is the age of Rare Earth.

Higher Atlas: The Marrakech Biennale in Context [4] brings together a collection of texts that dilates on the social and historical context, history, and contemporary reality of exhibition making in North Africa and in particular, Morocco. For Chan and Samman, the exhibition is the primary locus of artistic information; firsthand experience of the work is the best way to understand it. The catalogue, published in English and French, with an Arabic online edition to follow, is intended to provide a context for the exhibition within preexisting and future frameworks for understanding some of the considerations that went into this edition of the Marrakech Biennale.